Kailua Labs is a seed stage startup building a search platform that unlocks next-generation search and enrichment on your images, text and video through one simple SaaS API. Our mission is to make content in every application accessible the way people already think and talk about it.
We are backed by Matrix Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, Firsthand Ventures, StartX and former execs in top tech companies like Apple, AirBnB, Oracle, LinkedIn, and more, as well as researchers from MIT and Google X. Our founders are ex-Apple engineers with deep experience shipping ML and search systems to hundreds of millions of users across the globe and we have an incredibly talented founding team of ex-Apple, Google and Amazon engineers. We are moving quickly and are passionate about providing a magical experience for our growing customer base.
Apply to Kailua LabsThe Role
We’re seeking an engineering leader to build the next generation of personalized multimodal search. You’ll be joining as the first non-founding leader on the engineering team and will be critical to helping the team iterate and develop a product our customers love, while establishing an engineering culture that embodies quality, speed and customer obsession. This role is a great fit if you like moving quickly, can work across the stack when necessary and want a seat at the table making decisions about the future of the product & technology. The ideal candidate is able to be hands on in the beginning but thinks strategically and can grow into managing leaders in the future. Most of the technical work will be reviewing designs, some small amount of reviewing code and little to no writing code. You will manage all of the individual contributors on the team, and eventually, any managers.
Who you are
- A student for life: You love to learn and intentionally seek ways to accelerate your learning. You crave continuous feedback from those around you and are willing to share feedback across all levels. You’re always looking for better ways of doing things.
- A cherished collaborator: You are compassionate and help others around you. You form meaningful relationships wherever you go. You earn respect by being respectful.
- Eager to deliver: You can quickly hit the ground running, map out challenges and opportunities and develop a plan to improve things in the short and long term. You’re perfectly comfortable operating in an environment without much (or any) guidance.
- An owner: You have strong ownership of any task that you take on, driving it to success whether or not you've done it before. You have a strong sense of urgency.
Requirements & Skills
- Experience leading teams to deliver and operationalize Deep Learning or search systems
- Worked in startups and tech companies with A+ technical teams, and can point to individual initiatives and contributions that moved the company forward.
- Has led larger teams before (e.g. 20+ people), has managed managers, and can go deep into what their second-level reports are working on.
- Loves building teams, is able to attract great talent, and is a great mentor and coach
- Has solid technical knowledge in
- High-availability, multi-tenanted distributed systems (must have)
- Search (should have)
- Machine Learning (nice to have)
- Comfortable owning delivery. Requires collaboration with Product Management, but ultimately capable of owning engineering estimation and delivery for all new products and features.
- Comfortable owning system reliability. This includes driving the roadmap for betterments, orchestrating post-mortems and RCAs, and overseeing runbooks and on-call procedures. Ultimately capable of owning SLA adherence, with the support of the entire team.
- Familiar with (most of) our tech stack: Python, Rust, PyTorch, TorchServe, Pandas, NumPy, CUDA, SQL, key-value stores, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, Cloud (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.)
- Avid reader of everything LLM-related, spends a lot of time thinking about how they are changing the world.
- [Nice to have] Past research background
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity.
- Platinum-level health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family. We cover 99% of employee premiums and 95% of dependent premiums.
- Flexible Work - remote or in-person. We have a flexible work environment - work remotely from any U.S. timezone, or join us in-person at our San Francisco office.
- Unlimited PTO - take time when you need it to rest, relax, and recharge with unlimited PTO (minimum 4 weeks encouraged).
- Team events. Distributed work is awesome, but so is getting together in-person. Hang out with your colleagues at planned team events around the country.
Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Kailua Labs we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or another role.
Kailua Labs provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
Apply to Kailua LabsThe Role
We are hiring a Machine Learning Engineer for Search Relevance. You will be responsible for ensuring that our system provides the highest quality search results in the industry for all our customers, demos and application areas. You will devise evaluation strategies, build evaluation sets, run benchmarks, ensure quality monitoring is in place, and set the agenda / prioritization for where to focus our quality iterations. You will be empowered to model & prototype solutions and will either get them implemented in production or work with one of our other ML engineers and Applied Scientists to make sure it gets implemented at the highest standard of quality. You have exceptional attention to detail, love finding the root cause problems for things. You understand the arguments for Data Centric ML and are excited by the latest developments in LLMs, pre-training, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning and in-context learning.
Who you are
- You love to learn and look for ways to learn at an accelerated pace
- You are compassionate and help others around you
- You can quickly hit the ground running, map out challenges and opportunities and develop a plan to improve things in the short and long term
- You have strong ownership of any task that you take on, driving it to success whether or not you've done it before
- You can cut through ambiguity and deliver amazing results even when there isn't a lot of guidance
- You are always looking for better ways of doing things, trying out new tools and processes
- You form meaningful relationships wherever you go: people respect and like you because you value them
- You seek continuous feedback from those around you and are willing to share feedback across all levels of the company
Requirements & Skills
- Experience with deep learning, LLMs, and Transformers
- Tech stack: PyTorch, Python, and Pandas
- Experience in search and recommendations is welcome but not required
- Preferred Masters in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or related field
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity.
- Platinum-level health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family. We cover 99% of employee premiums and 95% of dependent premiums.
- Flexible Work - remote or in-person. We have a flexible work environment - work remotely from any U.S. timezone, or join us in-person at our San Francisco office.
- Unlimited PTO - take time when you need it to rest, relax, and recharge with unlimited PTO (minimum 4 weeks encouraged).
- Team events. Distributed work is awesome, but so is getting together in-person. Hang out with your colleagues at planned team events around the country.
- Brand new MacBook Pro (or PC if you prefer)
Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Kailua Labs we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Kailua Labs provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
Apply to Kailua LabsThe Role
We are hiring a staff machine learning engineer to build the next generation of personalized multimodal search. You’ll be joining as one of the earliest team members & will be critical to helping the team iterate and develop a product our customers love. This role is a great fit if you like moving quickly, can work across the stack when necessary and want a seat at the table making decisions about the future of the product & technology. The ideal candidate takes ownership over things and is excited to grow into a leadership position as the company and team grow in the future.
Who you are
- You love to learn and look for ways to learn at an accelerated pace
- You are compassionate and help others around you
- You can quickly hit the ground running, map out challenges and opportunities and develop a plan to improve things in the short and long term
- You have strong ownership of any task that you take on, driving it to success whether or not you've done it before
- You can cut through ambiguity and deliver amazing results even when there isn't a lot of guidance
- You are always looking for better ways of doing things, trying out new tools and processes
- You form meaningful relationships wherever you go: people respect and like you because you value them
- You seek continuous feedback from those around you and are willing to share feedback across all levels of the company
Requirements & Skills
- Experience with deep learning, LLMs, and Transformers
- Tech stack: PyTorch, TorchServe, Python, Pandas, NumPy, CUDA
- Experience in search and recommendations is welcome but not required
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity.
- Platinum-level health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family. We cover 99% of employee premiums and 95% of dependent premiums.
- Flexible Work - remote or in-person. We have a flexible work environment - work remotely from any U.S. timezone, or join us in-person at our San Francisco office.
- Unlimited PTO - take time when you need it to rest, relax, and recharge with unlimited PTO (minimum 4 weeks encouraged).
- Team events. Distributed work is awesome, but so is getting together in-person. Hang out with your colleagues at planned team events around the country.
- Brand new MacBook Pro (or PC if you prefer)
Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Kailua Labs we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Kailua Labs provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.